Occupy Wall Street...

Yesterday morning I went along to a client meeting at a business school near Wall Street, after the meeting we decided to take a bit of a detour and go and see the people camping out for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

I'm not sure how much has been on the news back at home, but it seems the 'Occupy' protests are going global. They started off in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street, then spread to other major cities like Washington DC (and we saw some in Boston) and now it's gone global.

I think the jist of it is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, by paying too many taxes. There's a lot of talk about the '99%', so I think it's about the 1% of the population (ie. the mega rich) are being looked after, whereas the other 99% are being swindled.

There have been various protests around New York as well as the permanent camp site at Wall Street. The other weekend - when we were enjoying a calm and peaceful time in Greenwich Village - there were protests right around the corner from us (although we never saw them), and later that night Times Square was FULL of protesters. Then the other night, when I came out of the G.Love gig there were loads and loads of police at Union Square - I later found out that while I'd been in the gig around 300 protesters had marched to Union Square and then decided to go back to Wall Street.

 

Regardless of all the political stuff - it was fascinating to go down and see the campsite, it actually felt more like a little village. It's quite incredible that in the 2 months that people have been camping out they've set up library's, food kitchens, classes and workshops, media stations for web interviews and blogging, there are people giving lectures, there are people screen printing t-shirts for the protesters.

 They've created a whole little village community down there!

As you'd expect there were some crazies there, some weird conspirators who'd written about the police and the 9/11 attacks and George Bush being behind them - so that side of it was a little weird...

... and I'm pretty sure a fair few of the people camping out were homeless anyway and have found somewhere where they can be safe and have food (which isn't a bad thing!). But it's admirable what they're doing - although now the cold weather's suddenly arrived (it's forecast for some snow today), it'll be interesting to see how long the make-shift village lasts.

It's funny, watching the different news stations here in American, you can get a completely different spin on what's happening. We were flicking and saw a bit of Fox News last night and they were reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests, carefully selecting clips from interviews with protesters who weren't as switched on as the others, who didn't really know what they wanted the outcome of all this to be. Then the reporter was saying how the whole protest is based on 'moaning' and has no political backing or structure to it.

You wouldn't get that bias on the good old BBC would you?

I wonder what Hugh Edwards has got to say about all of this?! 

I'd like to find out a bit more about what the real protests are about and maybe go down there again and take some better photos, there were some real characters down there. I'll just have to time it when the police aren't using mace and the protesters aren't getting ready to march anywhere.